August 1967:
Ryan had served in the Brown Water Navy on
swift boats out of Qui Nhon in Viet Nam where he met Harry Baker. Harry Baker
wasn’t in the Navy. He wasn’t in the Army. He wasn’t in the Marines or the Air
Force either. At first Ryan thought Harry Baker was C.I.A., or maybe O.N.I.,
but soon learned Harry Baker was one of many contractors hired by the services
to do jobs... well, jobs that were, off the record. Harry Baker was one of
those people you had to work with in the services that you respected but wouldn’t
have wanted anything to do with off the job. Since 1965, Ryan’s crew had
dropped off this mysterious man in places no one but Charlie would venture into
and then pick him up a hundred klics down-river. Nothing was ever said about
these missions.
Baker had a good eye for talent and also knew
which closets in high places where the skeletons were hidden to get his personnel
where he could use them. Though Ryan was a good swift boat commander, he was
better suited for intelligence work. Baker recommended Ryan for the Naval Investigation
Service of the O.N.I., and, after training at Quantico, he was stationed at the
Saigon Embassy to sniff out the drug trade that had been infecting all branches
of the military services in Vietnam. Wars are rarely won by going up the
official chain of command. It takes people like Baker to secretly put people in
places where the Peter Principle doesn't apply.
Ryan was in his room when there was a knock on
his door. He hated these off-duty calls. He hadn’t slept a full night in a week
and he'd been looking forward to hitting the sack for so long he’d stopped
counting the hours.
He shouted from under his pillow, “Go away!”
However, the way it works with intelligence
services, there's no such thing as off-duty.
“Ryan, open the door or I’ll kick it in.”
Ryan had been expecting Baker... he’d looked
him up and made contact through a friend of a friend, about a sensitive personal
case in the drug trade, so he got off his cot and opened the door.
Harry Baker wasn’t instrumental in uncovering
who was exporting it and to whom it was imported but he was involved in taking
care of the problem.
"Harry, I need a favor returned. We've
uncovered a problem and, at the head of the list of the problem is my brother,
William."
Ryan’s work was about investigating and
accumulating evidence to be turned over to Hoover’s suits for prosecution
stateside, but, for independent contractors such as Harry Baker, it was about
eliminating the problem altogether.
"He's mixed up with some nasty shit... my
team, you know, we've been investigating a case."
"Drugs?" Harry Baker knew all about
it but played along, "Your Brother? I see... and you want me to do
what?"
"Yeah, It's China White going home in
aluminum boxes out of Da Nang.... coffins. I can't go near this, but I think
maybe you can..."
"There's no need to bloody your gloves
over your brother. He's in Da Nang?
"Yes…William Ryan, Spec-4, at the Mortuary
Affairs Unit. The O.N.I. boys have pulled the covers on most of those involved.
Willy's part is shit, he's way over his head in it, know what I mean?"
“So, what do you want me to do?” Harry Baker’s
always knew what strings to jerk, how hard to jerk them, and how to use what he
knew to some future advantage.
Chief Warrant Officer, Patrick Ryan, liked
Harry Baker’s ability to get things done. Sometimes these were done in ways
Ryan wouldn't approve of, but his likes and dislikes didn’t matter concerning
his brother. "Look, I’m up for promotion and my brother...” Ryan was
embarrassed to admit his motives, but the fact that his own brother might be
involved in smuggling heroin made him particularly vulnerable to unwanted
scrutiny. “I don’t want you to harm him beyond fuckin’ him up enough...”
Harry, impatient with long stories to explain
common human frailties, raised a hand to interrupt, “...enough to have him shit
his pants out of this racket.” Baker liked Ryan and had seen him in action.
Whatever corruption he might be involved in was covered by the fact that he was
good under fire. But, for Harry Baker, nothing was free, “You know you’ll owe
me for this one.”
Harry met with Willy Ryan at the China Beach
Surf Club. It was a casual meeting in front of the beer stand. Surf boards
leaned against the beer shack, GI’s in knee length cut-off baggies hung around
with bottles in hand, waiting for a set: it could have been from an instamatic
picture of any scene in Baja California or anywhere else every surfer dreams
of. The surrealism of a war going on just a few klics away didn’t escape
anyone’s consciousness. That is what the beer, the rum, the vodka, the gin or
the pot, heroin, and for some… some are even said to chew on a taste of C-4 to
get a kick assed mother-fuckin’ trippin’ high… that’s what all of that was for…
to blot out the faces of smiling gooks from out of the dark of a hootch or the
thump of mortars and the AK’s staccato clack of caps busted... decapitations…
punji sticks, legs and limbs… bloody shit and guts spilled out… all of it that
was surely awaiting the next patrol. The chances that the award for service,
beyond getting fucked up in one of the above, aforementioned ways, was very likely to be in one of those
aluminum boxes Army Specialist William Ryan had been packing up to be shipped
back to Travis for the past six months.
Reaching out a hand to greet Harry, Willy
offered, “Ya fuckin’ wanna Tiger Piss?”
Harry put a hand forth, wrapping his huge paw
around the un-calloused hand of a man who’d not done a lick of work in several
years. “No thanks, I’ll stick with a Schlitz.”
“Pat told me you’re some kind a skivvy honcho…
got some fuckin’ Mo-Jo of some sort, eh?”
The word, fuck, Harry never did like it…, no
matter where there were GI’s in Vietnam everything was fuckin’ fuckin’… mother
fucker…, fucked-up, fucked-over and fuckin’ this or fuckin’ that. No offense
was meant by the term and no offense was taken, but Harry just wanted to get on
with his business and get it fuckin’ over with.
“I want you to listen real close to me,” Harry
paused long enough to make sure the kid was listening.
“I’m all fuckin’ ears,” Willy’s brain was in
high gear wondering, who the fuck did my brother send over here behind these
pilot’s sunglasses?
“You have a choice… You need a change of
scenery,” Harry pulled out a manila envelope. “Read ‘em.”
Willy held the papers away from the sunlight
for longer than it would have taken him to read them twice… … a lateral
transfer to the Marines… report to Camp Schwab… rank and all. He knew the
training camp in Okinawa… he’d stuffed enough of the Corps’ corpses to know
what the line at the bottom of the form meant… Marine Recon units were trained
there.
“Okinawa? What the fuck? A Marine recon unit?
Who the fuck are you?” The papers trembled in his grip. “Shit, I ain’t being
trained for fuckin’ recon… I ain’t never even been through grunt fuckin’ boot
camp! How can I…?”
“Your question ought to be, what is my choice?”
“I don’t fuckin’ get it.” Like a rat in a maze…
Willy’s mind had no idea where it was being led. It hit on the idea that this
had to do with an O.N.I. investigation, or something like that… maybe his
brother was tipping him off by sending this guy. “You got fuckin’ nothing on
me. Even if you fuckin’ did, I’d take the Stockade at Presidio over humpin’ the
paddies like a pig-fuckin’ grunt.
“No one said anything about Presidio,” Harry
took off his shades so that there was no doubt left at all about his steel grey
eyes.
“Hey, does the Alférez know about this?”
“No, you’re in the clear… just another
body-bagger that can’t take it anymore.”
Willy tried to stay composed, but he was damned
near shittin’ his pants, “Let me get this straight, you ain’t talkin’ stockade?”
“No, I’m not talkin’ prison.”
Peculiar things happen in life that turn a guy
like Willy around. His first tour in Recon gave him a taste of blood… he loved
it… loved it so much that he re-upped… loved it so much that, after he
recovered from shrapnel wounds in Okinawa, a couple Bronze Stars and a Purple
Heart, he went civilian contractor for P.R.U. He took his bullet in Cambodia or
Laos… no one said… no one cared… he was a civilian and the body counts are for
G.I.’s. He never got to go home in one of the silver caskets either… his
newfound honor bought him a hole in the red clay.
Despite that, CWO Patrick Ryan and Harry Baker
were beholden to each other because, in a way, Baker had saved his brother and,
well, these are bonds that aren’t broken very easily. They had also worked
together in another case in which Baker had pulled Ryan out of hot water with
several cross-jurisdictions on the Kraszhinski case. They had history.
It is often things that begin as small favors
returned, and protecting Nick was one of those. It wasn’t as though Ryan had
been corrupted because of an attraction to a sordid vice but, ironically
enough, it was about a debt of honor to him. Honoring an old friend that had
helped him out with his brother. There were limits however, and Nick had
stretched Ryan’s loyalty to breaking point and now that Harry Baker was gone...
well, how long... how long?
“This is how long.” He answered himself. This
was it in Ryan’s mind.... a line had been crossed and it was his duty to let
the bricks fall where they would from this day forward. It was something he
faintly remembered David Kraszhinski saying, “A boy becomes a man when his
father dies.” Maybe it was that. Nick’s father, Harry Baker, in a roundabout
way had been his own father. And now, he too, was free of those bonds.
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